


Put My Heart in a Jar & Put That in a Palm Tree

by Rhyolight



Series: Containers for the Things Contained [2]
Category: Castle
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 18:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhyolight/pseuds/Rhyolight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post "47 Seconds."<br/>Like everyone else, I needed to fix things. The characters I love are not fatheads.</p><p> I mentioned sex. Don't worry, I swear my characters would rather talk about something than act.</p><p>I should add that I don't own any of this, they belong to Andrew Marlowe et Co. and I just move them around. Except for the Bartender, who is on loan from the Thrilling Adventure Hour and probably Lisa Lutz as well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 'She remembered everything....'

He was trying to contain his anger as he had tried to contain his love, but it made a roiling toxic mixture. By the time the elevator reached the ground floor, Rick had to turn around and get to the nearest men's room - not quite back to the same floor as Beckett's desk, thank God. He hurled till he was gasping, throat and stomach spasming far longer than they had anything left to void. Couldn't recall when he had last been so sick. Certainly from something less destructive than this nauseated anger as the bottom and sides tore out of his universe and made their way past his throat.

Rick was well into the 'seeing stars' part when he felt like he could get up, sit on the toilet (fully clothed, not much drool on his shirt, that was something). Only now he was crying. Oh, really great. He hadn't cried like this when Beckett was bleeding in the ambulance. Hadn't felt this kind of loss. He had feared he might, would, was, losing her then, but not his whole world. Not the world that had been so bright when he loved Beckett. When it was a world with his beautiful, arrow-swift, crescent-moon clean, possibly-one-daynotdistant Beckett. He was shaking.

Cannot have a breakdown at the cop shop, cannot.

He had had enough training over the years in stifling his emotions, putting their hands behind their backs, cuffing them, wrapping a coat over their head and hustling them away from anyone who might see. But they had been good little emotions, little bright-eyed things he could let loose once he was safely home. Little happy things that made life brighter, sunsets more vivid, joy more joyful… coffee more coffeeish.

Because he was in a world with someone so amazing, because whether he held her or not she was there, she was lovely and extraordinary and uniquely wonderful, and now there was no world where she was. He had taken her for a living goddess, and she was emptier and less human than …. Well, she was still lovely, and she did have a mind like … like he had rarely met before anywhere, curious and intelligent and well-read… .'You're such a snob,' he interrupted himself.

'I'm so fucking tired of explaining everything I say,' he yelled back. 'Christ, I could talk most of the time without using my short words and concrete sentences to someone besides my mother, for God's sake, and Alexis.'

'Who is leaving, by the way.'

'Just shut up.' At least, by the time he pulled out of that dialogue, his breathing was less ragged. He blew his nose. He could feel the edges of the giant hole in his calm and negotiate them, cautiously, long enough to get home. He knew well enough he would have to explore that pit again; but he could make it to somewhere less public now.

How do you think about someone who isn't dead, but never lived? Who had given him hope and joy and reasons to be a better man, a livelier man, a more useful person, a healthier person, and he was wrong, she had never been there? Rick splashed water on his face, succeeded in leaving the building, looked at the sky. Can I smell it? just a little cordite or something, not the towers again, no. But still, another explosion to leave people a little more tense, a little more crazy-scared, a little more duck-and-cover, more the-hell-with-you-Jack, I've-got-mine.

No, that was later. What he most recalled for the first week after that perfect morning on September 11 was people being infinitely kinder, gentler with one another, willing to give strangers just a little more slack because they knew exactly how injured the other people in their city had been.

Another bomb. A small bomb, not at all the size of two jets full of rocketfuel, just another stab at a place where he and the city he loved — without much illusion— was already tender.

That was good. Be angry at bombers. Think about criminals.

That strategy worked fairly well, even if he let his mother into the particular flavor of his funk, probably a mistake, since nothing she could say would make it better. She just looked like she was going to say'Time heals all wounds,' or 'No one could be what you thought she was,' and in fact anything she said would sound like the practical, irritating voice in his head. Not the one that calls me a snob, Martha is cool with things like that. Knowing that, in parts and at times he was just as bad as she was made him crazy. One of the ways he wanted to be different. She was surprised he was going back to the precinct? He wasn't letting the dismemberment of his world betray the one other people lived in. He couldn'tleave the scene of the crime (Beckett's crime. Stop it now, Ricky.) until he had done all he could to help people clear up the broken lives that lay like glass around Boylan Plaza. Alexis will notice if I'm not there. Oh, God. Alexis will notice… .

In fact, Rick felt like he was more on his game than usual. The worst part was waiting for the burner phone to show up. Gates hadn't been thrilled to hear the new suspect was a media personality; they had been sweeping all the easy places to lose something nearby as a matter of course since they realized they needed to find a garage door opener. Suspended dumpster pickups until hundreds of cadets from the academy could comb through them: though fortunately for the baby cops, someone looking at storm drains had had good luck relatively quickly. Thank God for stupid criminals, for amateur criminals, for dumb vain people who thought their looks and desires made them more important than —stop it now, getting too close there.

And yes, despite it all: even he felt glad when he knew people could stop looking over their shoulders for that particular bomber, soon enough the habit of looking extra hard at anyone who looked different wouldn't harden into hate crimes. Saving New York from weeks and months of reliving September Eleventh, keeping it to, perhaps, just a flashback, not so much of a new trauma on that old wound. He tried to dwell on that when he could, while Gates thanked them all. Was Rick glad or not that Espo and Ryan had to refuse the debriefing party? Because he still cared about them, still cared about their what they did, their staunchness, the people who did their jobs. Whether anyone could tell from reading Raley and Ochoa, knowing them had changed the way Rick saw the supporting players.

But he was glad to be released from the glass bubble that kept him from turning on Beckett. Admitting how much he had placed in her, hope for someone who burned so bright in his vision burning for him. Almost close enough to touch FOR FOUR YEARS. Even the summer he spent with Gina, Rick had still believed in Beckett as he saw her. Just thought she wasn't for him, which was hard, which had been so hard, which had made the hoping, when he had allowed it, so much more poisonous. I will not do this in front of her friends, my friends. But it was a narrow escape.

He didn't want to go home. He did not want to talk to his mother; he knew he couldn't hide his brokenness from Alexis; he wished Cannell were still alive, he had never opened his heart to Patterson; he needed more friends and fewer ex-lovers, he needed, oh, God—

Rank had its privileges; somebody managed The Old Haunt for him, but he had a room of his own there. It was a quiet place with an old but working laptop. (He had installed wireless in one room of the bar, and the offices, but the rest was still radio-silent.) As it happened the public rooms were quiet. "Hey Kent," he said to the bartender.

"Hey Rick. What you drinking?"

"Not very much, okay? No matter what I ask, no matter what I tell you."

The bartender smiled briefly. "Sorry. That made me think of Young Frankenstein for a second." They thought about Gene Wilder screaming for bit, and he handed Rick a shot glass. It smelled amazing. Rick held the glass, savored the years and the peat and the ocean and Culloden and practically the Romans. WAY too good to gulp.

"I don't remember ordering anything this good."

"You told us you wanted a range of spirits. And I know you wouldn't waste good booze. So you got a monster in your room you wanna tame?"

Surge of feeling. Rick gritted his teeth."Can't go there yet." Bartender nodded. Rick took a slow sip, tried to stay in the moment.

Kent wiped glasses. It was what he did. Offered a careful, gentle observation in case Rick might want that kind of chat. "The bombing was a terrible thing."

"That it was. Hey. We solved it."

Kent gave him a look of respect and clinked the glass he was wiping on Rick's. "Pretty good monster tamed, then."

"Stupid. Greedy."

"Not political, then?"

"Stupider than that."

The bartender shrugged. "I'm not much of a guy for causes. Good substitute for a life, I guess."

"I think it really depends. Sometimes you don't get much choice about having a life, either."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of all the gin joints in all the world....

Kate Beckett went down to the morgue. Lanie was cleaning up. The city would be doing so for awhile, but only — only— five corpses, on an otherwise quiet day: the pathologist was done. Alexis had left earlier in the day. "Something's the matter with Castle," Kate said without preamble.

"Girlfriend, the amount of time you spend thinking about someone you haven't even kissed —so to speak— you could buy Manhattan. So, ask him."

"He's gone all quiet and distant after being all meaningful earlier today."

"Meaningful how?"

Kate told her about the two interrupted Castle-perorations. "And then he says no, it's nothing, and walks out. I don't think it's nothing. And I think, I think, he seemed like whatever 'nothing' was, he thought it was me."

Lanie looked at her friend. "Do you feel guilty?"

"Should I?"

"I don't know. But if you did, it might suggest whether whatever got his tongue was your fault or something else."

"I don't think I feel guilty." Kate was a detective. Her whole life worked around looking at someone's actions, staring at the scene of the crime, unquote. It had been a long, exciting day; she had interrogated 'the person responsible for the bombing' at least three times, maybe four. She knew she was tired. She hadn't given any real thought to anyone else; the hunt, the chase, the puzzle focussed all her attention while she was on its trail. Now, with the game off its feet, her vision no longer tunnelled. Had she noticed when Castle stopped being the faithful hound next her? No, he hadn't quit till the criminal was at bay, led away. But had he been with her, or just pursuing?

Lanie broke in. "Okay, usually it's men who are stupid and women who are crazy, but let's assume for the moment he thinks it's the other way around. What could you have done that he'd think you were stupid and you'd think he was crazy to feel that way? Anything?"

"That's a little harsh, Lanie."

"I am tired. And you have been being stupid where he's concerned for way too long. As I have said before."

Kate thought about the day. Thought about a cold cup of coffee.

"Oh shit."

"You want to talk about it?"

Kate was getting out her phone. "Maybe not right now not to you."

"Maybe not so stupid after all —"

Kate was up the stairs to better cell reception. Castle wasn't answering. She called his home.

"Martha, may I speak to Rick?"

Castle's mother's voice would have cut glass. "He's not here." A little thaw as Martha said, "The ten o'clock news broke your story. Congratulations."

"Castle's work as much as anyone's. Do you know where he is?"

"No. I imagined he was with you. Celebrating." The diamond voice again, the word 'celebrating' pronounced with the same relish as 'frolicking with lepers.' Though there was probably a charity…

Kate wondered if her mouth could shape the words Do you know what's the matter? "He left. He— I think there's something. On his mind." Was that enough of her pride sacrificed to find out what Martha knew?

"Detective, there's been 'something on his mind' ever since he met you, but I think you finally made him change the subject."

"I didn't mean to —"

"Kate, how could you?" Martha didn't expand on what Kate should not have done, but that didn't seem to be necessary.

Now someone asked, Kate didn't see how she could have, either.

"I thought you were the most intelligent woman he'd ever cared about — he loved you more than Alexis or me — don't interrupt, I think it's important to have friends one's own age — but all that's meant is that you've hurt him worse than I've ever seen. I know mothers are allowed not to be partial, but my son was ready to offer you everything in exchange for anything you wanted to give back. And you were too— I don't know."

"Scared?" Kate asked, asking herself as well.

"I'm sorry, Kate, I don't know and right now I don't care much, either."

"I couldn't TAKE 'everything,' and I don't think I have anything to give back-"

"Bullshit," said Martha, very clearly, which somehow underlined to Kate how bad things really were. The actress was as careful as the writer with the power of her words. "That wasn't what he saw in you, and I used to think he might have had a point. I know he can be overwhelming, I know he can be way too much, but you could have dialled all that down if you gave him a chance."

"I like how he is," Kate said weakly.

"And I am the right person for you to tell, of course. You have no idea what he was willing to do for you. When I recall how he's agonized over that information about your mother—"

"I know—"

"No, actually, you don't. Can we say good night, Detective? Good night."

Martha punched in her son's speed-dial number. "Hey, kiddo, you solved it!" Not too much enthusiasm, but he needed to remember what he and his cops had done mattered.

"Hello, Mother. Yeah. It's good."

"I never thought Leanne What'sHerName had much screen presence anyway."

"I believe that was her problem."

"So you're out celebrating?"

"I am sitting in the Old Haunt with Kent and a glass of Scotch that I am reasonably certain is older than you are. Than what your publicist says, for sure."

"Beckett's looking for you."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her you weren't here."

"And what else?"

Damn him, he had always been too smart. "Not much she hadn't figured out for herself."

"You must not have told her anything."

""Oh, Richard, don't be that bitter. She was very upset."

"Well, good, that's two of us. Nicely separated, as she has always preferred. Oh, crap."

"Richard?"

"The door just opened, and 'Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world—' " Martha heard her son say, whether to the phone or to the new character onstage.

"Oh, dear," she said.

"Can I call you back later, Mother?"

"You can come home, sooner. Take care of yourself, dear, don't say anything you'll regret too much in the morning—" she heard the connection break.

Rick folded his cellphone and put it back in his pocket as Beckett walked slowly toward him. Next to him, Kent smoothly refilled his shot glass and made another one like it.

"You'll want to go to your office?" suggested the bartender.

"What, when Ilsa's just arrived—?"

"'I don't want any trouble,' isn't that what I'm supposed to say?"

"Remind me to raise your salary."

There was a lot to say he read that on Kate's face. He was fairly sure there was nothing to say. He didn't want to say any of it. They had lost the time when he wanted to say things. All he had was a small fist of infinite density in his gut and something that might want to be a blinding headache coming in his forehead. Maybe he could do the spontaneous auto-combustion he had always dreamed of--


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bartender doesn't want any trouble. Rick and Kate don't have a choice.

"Congratulations on the bombing thing, Detective," Kent said, moving as smoothly as an oiled nun from behind the bar to put the glass in Kate's hand. "You and Mr. Castle were just going upstairs."

"We were?"

"We are," Rick said, still not looking at her. "I guess. If you came here to see me. The Scotch is quite good, though, you might want to enjoy it alone. Or I might."

"Rick —"

"I'm Rick now?"

"I don't want any trouble," the bartender insisted. There actually were a few other customers, reading or talking and trying not to watch the tableau too obviously.

"Oh, I think I do," his boss muttered.

"Mr. Castle."

"We need to get a really big mirror so we can throw chairs at it."

"I'll give you each a shot of Jack and then upstairs."

"I don't need —" Kate began.

"Oh, you will. Thank you, Kent, we'll go quietly."

Rick downed the shot of cheap whiskey and headed up the stairs, not looking (not needing to look) to see whether Beckett was following. He really needed to eat something, sometime. The alcohol burned at the chunk of neutron star inside him. His office still smelled like a place he did not live, a place he had not eaten pizza or takeout; he hadn't done enough to make it his own. The overhead lighting was ugly fluorescent and the desk lamp was not much use. He didn't want it to look romantic; he was pretty sure she wouldn't take it that way. He settled in the fairly comfortable desk chair, leaving Beckett a settee. 'They're normally referred to as love-seats. Settee is for your English readers.' His internal dialogue was stupid today. He was not in a mood for loveseats.

He had never thought he would not want to talk to Beckett. He had trouble sitting facing her, settled for focussing on her shoes. "Well. What?"

"I could ask you that," Beckett said. She didn't seem upset. In the past he might have thought that was a sign in itself, of Kate containing her powerful passions. Now he wondered whether she was just really that calm.

Rick kept himself himself from making another flip response. Nice I still have an endless supply. He took a small sip of the Scotch. "Okay. You told Bobby you remembered everything when you were shot. If that's true, then your not wanting to see me for three months seems to be directly related to my. Having. Said. ThatIlovedyou." He felt his face flush and ignored it. He could still hear his voice and so far he hadn't said anything stupid. Okay, keep going. "And you told me you couldn't remember anything. Maybe you were trying to spare my feelings. You did a lousy job and I am sorry I am putting both of us through this so why don't you leave and let me get over you in peace?"

Beckett's voice was slow—that was her— and distant—that was probably him. "Spare your feelings from what? I can't believe you're saying this."

"Spare my feelings from not their 'being reciprocated,' I think is the traditional way to put it. It's what people do when they don't love somebody else. I keep offering you chances to leave so I can spare _your_ feelings. Because I keep thinking you have some kind of conscience and didn't want to hurt me. Which may not be very realistic of me, considering, but you have never thought I was very realistic, so fine."

"You're angry because you think I am trying to spare your feelings," Kate felt toward whatever the hell mess they were in.

I really don't need my feelings reflected right now. "No, I'm angry because you lied to me. Because sometimes you helped me hope you did care for me as more than a useful," he had to think, "detective appliance. Not that there's anything wrong with being one of those; I like being useful. But it would have helped if you had let me know you'd ruled me out as anything else." And I am angry because I am sad. Oh, God, I am so sad. I loved you so much. And now you're sitting there looking like I speak fluent Klingon. "But I should have known that from all the times you didn't want to talk. I was trying to leave you space, because you asked for space, because I know you have had hard times. But by now I have had some hard times too, and I wish I could expect you to— to show up for me. But that's because the person, the woman I had in my head" you're in my heart/you're in my soul, my breath "is not who you are and I'm sorry for mistaking you and please, go away." And he did stop facing her and tried to breathe.

Kate knew what the bomb had looked like, afterward, had a good idea what it had felt like a hundred feet from the lamppost in Boylan Square. Now it had gone off inside her. She was empty, the silence within that stunned air and dust in unprecedented patterns unable to settle, filled with futile energy. Her face felt like it was a long way off.

"I screwed up." Simplest place to start. Rick, I'd never hurt you — Nope, she already had. I didn't know any better— Nope. How many times had her shrink, had Lanie tried to tell her whatever she was doing it wasn't going to work? I was a mess and I made a mistake. Certainly not something a cop had never heard. Worth a try. She needed to feel her way into the truth. She had not known there was a truth she was estranged from. "I was a mess and I made a mistake."

"You sure don't work a crime like someone who's a mess, and any 'mistake' you made with me you went on making over and over again. It's not like there wasn't a time in the past YEAR you could have talked to me." Rick faced her again. "Kate. I made a mistake. Before anything else— well, not before the cop stuff, but that's important—"

This was so surreal she had trouble connecting it to anything she was hearing, but she did kind of like the way he still had the sense to know the business of the police they did together was not, could not be, subject to friendship-

"But before anything else between us, we were friends. I told you you are extraordinary. And I believed in you enough I thought you would rather know that stuff I found out about your mother. And I screwed up there so much you wanted me out of your life then. I should have listened."

"But you were right." Kate tried to make him hear it.

" I was wrong. I don't think it's made you happier. I thought the truth would set you free but I made all of us lose Montgomery and I got you shot. And it's worse now."

This made no sense to Kate at all. "You didn't shoot me, Castle. You didn't shoot Roy."

"All I've done is open a can of very angry worms."

Kate sighed. She couldn't remember seeing him, Castle, annoying man-about-town, so bereft of his swagger.

"Which at least, " he went on, "I won't need to poke at anymore." He made a face, kind of 'so what?' "And despite my jumping into that with big heavy boots, you let me come back and solve crimes with you. Can you blame me for thinking it was the best relationship ever? Only… being your friend was hard to separate from wanting to be something a lot more intense. And maybe that was where I went wrong and started seeing more than there was. You had a life and a nice guy and you made it clear I wasn't part of it."

No, Kate wanted to say, and if ever there was to be a time anymore it was now. "I broke up with Demming for you, but you went off to the Hamptons with Gina! Nobody heard from you. Would we ever have seen you again if we hadn't arrested you?"

"With everything you have ever heard me say about Gina, you couldn't just call me later in the week? Because that was about as long as I took that shot at renewing our, our 'meaningful relationship' seriously. Her either. I damn sure wasn't going to remarry her or she, me." He stopped for moment. "You broke up with Demming for me?"

"Yeah." Actually stopped him for a second. Kate held her breath.

"Damn. I wish someone had told me that sometime in the last two years." He shook his head. "Not that it mattered, because by then you were with Josh." Rick's tone was bitter and joyless.

She had never been sure what was behind his barbs at Dr. Motorcycle Boy: just casual male another-guy-in-my-territory? After Gina came back on the scene, Kate had laid aside any theory there was more to Rick's jibes than that. (Except when Lanie suggested I was being dishonest. Except sometimes when he looked at me. Except at night -)

Rick went on. "I don't think you're as bad at relationships as you make out."

"That's what it looks like? From where I'm sitting right now I don't think I'm much good at them at all. No, I wanted there to be more than friendship — more intense— I wanted that, too."

"You picked a damn awful way to show it."

"I was scared."

"So what? It's not like I was the one with a Do Not Disturb sign on me. Since you came back last fall then I've given you all the space you wanted, but it turns out there's no one there to give space to. No one for me, anyway. You're scared? I tiptoe around trying not to set off any Beckett Fragility Alarms. I would do anything in my power for you, intense friends or just partners, I try to protect you with my life—"

"And you have —"

"We both have, not just because of the police stuff, but you won't talk about it — just like you can't even tell me 'I love you too but just not that way.'"

"I love you too, and just that way, Rick." She wanted that to make everything all right, but the tension in his shoulders did not release. She didn't feel any better either. (Miles to go before I sleep. If ever.)

He looked at her the way she looked at evidence. No, less excited. "I don't think so. It's one thing when you don't want to look at your emotions, but I put mine right out there and you really did not want to deal."

"How is that conversation supposed to start?" she asked, wondering how many times she had wanted to, started to, stopped herself from reaching for him.

"Don't pretend. I wouldn't have cared how it came up. Don't pretend I haven't thrown you the ball and watched it sail past you while you looked bland. Don't pretend you couldn't have said, 'Hey, Rick, thanks for helping me out of the sinking car, how about a hug?' Or, "Hey you know, when I was bleeding there, you said some stuff.' " He took a careful breath in and out. She had seen him containing himself before. He was good at it. "But you had no trouble at all asking me me if I'd slept with Sophia. What made that so easy? Because it had no risk for you?"

(Because it's easier to be jealous than it is to be honest. Because you made cracks about my boyfriends. Because snarky is easier than admitting in so many words that someone is important to you. Than it is to say, 'emotions are hard, people I love die, a holding pattern is safe, please don't move, please don't look too deep or I will shatter, shattering's easier than living through all this…' All this now is exactly what shattering is easier than, but it's happening, that's what's happened. I blew it.)

"People tell me I shouldn't walk around with my heart on my sleeve," Rick said. She was grateful that for this second he wasn't talking about her. "I always thought you were supposed to live life as much as you can and tell the truth. So I look shallow; in fact, I probably am shallow. But what you see is what you get. You people who run deep, with the still waters — you make it too easy for people like me to see what we want to see in you, like on a movie screen. Or maybe you don't run deep, but we can't tell, we go on seeing the beautiful person we want to be near. The one we love. And you: when I would find out a little more about how you ticked, it was always more than I had imagined. And I know most of that person is still true, the extraordinary cop, the woman with style and brains. But I thought there was heart there as well. I'd feel more like I could survive right now, if I hadn't thought there was more to you than the extraordinary Detective Beckett. But maybe you never did lie about that, and I just saw what I wanted to believe."

"I have a heart." Kate wasn't sure. Nothing inside her felt like it was breaking, though there was a part of her brain that was screaming Listen you idiot— but what she wanted him to listen to, she had no idea. She was tired. She was in shock.

"Not one that I've been able to get near."

"Nearer than anybody else ever has." She had trouble believing she had said that. She would have to think about whether it was true. What it meant. Looks like it's going to be a pretty much theoretical discussion.

"So you can write this into 'your poor damaged Kate' story. I wonder whether you should fire your therapist or he should fire you."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rick, Kent, and Beckett have seen the Bogart and Bergman movie _Casablanca_, and if you haven't and you're here reading this kind of stuff, you really probably should see it, too. Given that Rick Castle is who he is, I am amazed we haven't been subjected to a LOT more remarks about a guy named Rick owning a bar. Watching the end on YouTube will make you miss all kinds of good plot and great characterization. Whether you just watch the end or the whole movie, you may need someone to explain that Vichy, a mineral-water spa in France, was the seat of the government collaborating with the German occupiers in WW2. You thought you could have just a fanfic without any historical notes?

Rick heard himself talking and thought it was past time he shut up. His hurt or anger or whatever the hell he felt loss was starting to morph into something with its own motive force. "Can you please go away, before we won't even be able to pretend?'

"Pretend what?"

"Pretend whatever we've been pretending so far, I guess. I don't want Esposito or Ryan or, oh God, Lanie and Alexis to know how much I need not to be near you."

"It hurts to hear you say that."

"It hurts to feel this way. I've gotten so used to loving you. Probably not a good thing."

"You never said," she almost shouted. "Never except when I was bleeding to death on the ground, while we were burying someone— someone you know was more like a father to me than mine has ever been. I thought you were in shock too, I thought you were saying the things YOU would say to make my heart keep pumping. If I was sparing anybody's feelings they were mine. You do the flirty eyes thing with everyone who walks past, everything's a joke, everything's innuendo, you act like every beautiful woman we meet wants to sleep with you, and half of them have. Your ex-wife is a movie star. Your ex-babysitter's a model."

"I never slept with her, never would —"

"How great is that, you have standards! Why would I want to be a notch on your bedpost?"

The Angry Beckett was almost enough to distract him from his own feelings. "I haven't offered you that since the first time you turned me down. I haven't offered anybody that since, I don't know, a long time before you were shot! What do you want from me? Retroactive chastity? I hoped to God you would find happiness, and if it had to be with Dr. Motorcycle Boy I wasn't going to mess with it." It was on his lips to remark that she hadn't been able to manage that but Rick shut his mouth.

"He wasn't you. He was all kinds of great but he wasn't you. I broke up with Demming. You went off with Gina. You were still with Gina when I started going with Josh."

"Are you going to blame all this on my timing?"

"I'm not blaming anything on anyone. I need a minute. I know you've been miserable since about ten-thirty but I have to catch up. About ten months of catch up, from what Lanie tells me."

Rick watched her. Kate looked remote, tired. But not exhausted. As determined as he had ever seen her. She lifted the shot glass. "Don't toss it," he told her. "That Scotch is older than both of us." He watched her inhale, and sip. And sip again with surprised respect.

"Wow. That's sort of amazing." She smelled it again. "But Scotch doesn't get better after it's bottled. I doubt that it's much older than your daughter."

"Who isn't old enough… ha very ha." They had reached a moment of quiet. Not peace: regrouping. A break in the storm. Rick's head hurt.

"You have any water?" Kate asked. He pointed at the basin in the corner, by the tiny bar, and watched as she drank a large glass, refilled it and handed it to him. "Just drink it. You look like hell. Have you eaten anything today?"

"Bearclaw."

"Can we order in?"

"I don't think I can eat."

"What, never again?" Her voice held no mockery. "Can I order in?"

"I guess." She conferred with her phone, typed on it, put it away. Looked at him. "Can you sit over here, with me?"

"No."

"Sooner or later, I'm not going to be able to do this, but right now it's surprisingly easy to try to talk to you."

"I'm glad it's easy for somebody. Actually, I'm not—"

"What do you want, Rick?"

"This morning, I wanted you." He hoped it stung. It stung him. "Then I found out you had been lying to me, about something important, for months, and I felt like an idiot, and now I want to put my heart somewhere it won't ever get broken again. Or touched, or involved. I want to put it in a jar and hide it in a palm tree on an island guarded by a crocodile."

"Sounds Ancient Egyptian."

"I don't know what the hell. A crocodile on Mars."

"So, not Central Park."

"You've learned way too much from me."

'Some of it's been great," Kate said. "And that was why, this morning, I wanted you, too." He thought he heard the edge of her voice crack, just then, but still nothing showed on her face. "We're not going to go there right now, okay? We just deal with being friends? Which we were, even I could say that, and which I have completely fucked up, and I know I can't talk my way out, so I am going to risk a little going a little psychobabble-Hallmark and see if I can talk my way through. Do you want to be here? Because I want you to be here, because whether or not I fire my therapist or he fires me, this is about you and me and it matters." Her voice did crack.

"Drink some more water," Rick advised. "You're losing your Spock." He wondered whether he was feeling better or just on autopilot.

"Crap," she said. "Not easy." She kicked her shoes across the room, not in his direction, and sat cross-legged on the settee and wiped her hands across her face. "Do you want to be here and listen? I need you to tell me."

No, I don't. I want to stay angry. It fills up all the spaces in my head. "Yes." I've already lost. I'm used to listening to whatever you say. I'm used to taking it. "Yes, you said there would be food."

"What makes you think I ordered you any? By the way, that remark about 'Poor Damaged Kate' was below the belt." She held up her hand. "Just listen. It was mean because it's true. But also you've bought into it in a completely messed-up way and we both need to cut it out. Just shut up, Rick. Okay? Your turn next."

He was mesmerized. "Okay?"

"You remember when we met you cold-read me?"

"It was rude. I was showing off. I'm sorry."

"It was, completely; it was really annoying; you should be. I knew you were drawing me onto a page, making me into one of your characters. I didn't know then that you do it to everyone and actually I felt kind of flattered. I really like being your heroine," Kate said, with an intensity she had been missing all night.

"Nikki?"

"No. Your Beckett. Your extraordinary muse. She makes me want to be better than I am. She's like an exoskeleton I can pull myself up by. She's everything I could want. Except I wish she weren't such a weepy flower."

"You've lost me."

"You want to save her. And I love you, Rick, I love you for all you have wanted to give her but I am not the Beckett you want me to be. I'm just this one, and I fucked up. You would stand between me and the world, between me and the people who killed my mom, and protect me forever. And I love it. I drink it in and sometimes it really helps. And God forgive me for how much I like drawing your eyes. Whether you're thinking about undressing me or not."

Maybe just some buttons, Rick thought, trying not to interrupt. Possibly an outer layer.

"But I'd rather you looked at me and didn't see Brave, Brilliant Beckett who had a tragic flaw that you will mend with a kiss — the one who has— I really know- kicked you in the teeth. You can love and desire and bring offerings to heal the Beckett with PTSD, and murmur that something will break and it'll be bad for — for my being a cop, for my being a warrior, how magnificently troubled I am. But I don't think you connect that with my just making a common stupid mistake like someone who thinks the best way out is steal a car or holding up a bank."

"Still lost. Worse."

"Tragic heroines always look good. How many of those have we arrested? Not many, right? Some of them can still believe in their case, their nobility, but it's our job to break down that layer of shiny and be the voice of reason. The end does not justify the means."

"You can't kill people just because you want their money." Rick felt along the generalization carefully.

"And you can't kill someone just because you want their wife or their jobs or your self-image, right? And people do it all the time. And almost all of them know they are really being irrational. Unless they are really whacked-out I think our average criminals have a voice in their heads telling them they are not in so deep they can't pull out, until they are. I'm kind of lucky." She looked back at his disbelief. "I haven't killed anyone. Got my Freudian slip on on, blew it wide open in front of you that I did lie to you in the hospital and, by my silence, over and over again. At least once when you asked me outright. I'm sorry. But I still understand how I felt when I said that. Rick, what do you think 'messed-up, neurotic, kinda scarred' means? It doesn't mean you're loving someone perfect with a dent you can buff out by loving me. I'm a lo tmore used to being scared than I think I'll ever be to reaching for ...for happiness. For what I want. For," she took a deep breath. "For you."

Somebody knocked on the door. Rick stood up and answered. "Someone ordered in?" asked Kent. He handed his boss a paper sack and some high-end paper plates, a bottle of mineral water. "You have silverware, I think?"

"I do, thanks."

"You don't seem to have broken anything."

"The night is young."

"Leaving now."

"That was fast," Kate said, as he put everything down on the coffee table. Rick got the silverware and another glass. He looked again at the bottle.

"Bastard brought us Vichy water. If he's not a film student I'll hurt him."

"They didn't end up drinking it, though, did they?"

"Have to give him credit anyway." Rick poured the water into their glasses, picked it up to pledge her--such a perfect setting, and he'd already called her Ilsa. He froze and spun away.

"Rick, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She would have put her arms around him but he was across the room, faced against the wall. When Kate put her hand on his back she could feel him twitch away. He didn't see what that did to her face, to her heart.

"Go eat, all right? I'll be civilized again in a minute." After a minute she did as he'd asked, opening containers. Her hands were shaking and she had to stop to blow her nose. Rick went to get another glass of tap water. "You ordered chicken wings? I thought you hated chicken wings."

"I didn't want to order something I liked. Trying not to ruin it forever." Kate put a few on a second plate for him, some fries, and a tall cardboard cup next to them. "So you shouldn't be too surprised I got you a root beer." In some other life he had said that root beer was a poor cousin o cola that had outlived its historical roots. He didn't like it except with vanilla ice cream.

Chicken wings, eaten properly, are suggestive. It made her want to cry again, and she avoided looking at her partner. But at least the smell seemed to seduce Castle, and he ate something, anyway. She thought his color was better after that.

"I didn't call Lanie either while I was on leave," she offered.

"Yeah, I thought that was weird."

"She gave me about a week after I got back and tore my head off. Yelled until she was hoarse and then cried. She's still mad sometimes. But we're okay. Well, I mean, the friendship is working again." Except I don't listen to her advice about you.

"Is that what happened with Josh? Not that I have any right to ask."

"It doesn't actually matter. Whether you have the right or not. Or why we broke up. But he had places to go, and I wanted him in them, not next to me — his brand of trying to get me all better was—" she sighed. "I should be kind. Really dumb and tiring and after we didn't have sex for six weeks, while my stitches dissolved, it was very easy to end the rest of it."

"Sorry. Didn't, umm—"

"I have a body. It had bulletholes and surgical incisions and drains and what they swore was not real catgut. It still has scars: heart surgery, rib-spreading scars, not like a laparoscopy. I don't know if I want plastic surgery to fix them or not. Lanie had to take me out of the store the first couple times we tried to buy me a swimming suit. On the plus side, I can still have kids, at least as far as those organs are concerned. But I'm told that involves having at least a boyfriend and I'm not …" Her voice failed. "I look good in clothes, though," she said after a bit. "And I can go swimming."

"You do look good in clothes."

"I'm not fishing for compliments, Castle."

"I'm not chumming you with them."

"That metaphor didn't work."

"It's late." They sat. The fries were cold. Neither of them moved much. Castle got a text. "It's my mother. 'Yes, I'm alive, talking with Kate. Home later.' Send."

"She doesn't like me any more, " Beckett said.

"Yeah, well. She'll get over it."

"Will you ask her to?"

"I don't know. She doesn't really like me working with the police; the only reason I think she went along with Alexis doing the internship was to irritate me. And Alexis is out of harm's way, thank God."

"Not if she loses you." Kate kept his mother's words—that Rick had loved her more than Martha or Alexis—behind her teeth. Things that were not her business and never should have been said. He loves me. He, at least, he loved me.

"I realized—she's just, almost —"

"The age I was when my mom was killed, yeah. A year or so younger." Alexis hugged me, Kate thought.

"You'd be crazy if you were not wounded."

"I can be both. And I'm not the only one who's either." Kate wondered how long this timeless place could hold them, but trying to stay in a place like that was how it had come to this. "Rick, I asked you what you wanted now. Not this morning. What do you want tomorrow?"

"I have no idea," he said. "Tonight's been enough. Will they make you catch bodies tomorrow?"

"I hope not. There's always paperwork, but I don't know how long it will take for the Feds to generate theirs. Everyone was working full-out today and yesterday. Do you want to come in if they call us?

"I don't know. Yes, but I hope nobody gets killed. Beckett, I don't know if I can work with you like before."

Well, she thought. Not 'well' at all. "I hope… you'll give it some time before you decide either way."

"You do?"

"Yeah, I really do. And if you wanted to get out of the line of fire because of Alexis I'd understand."

"Even if I was using that as an excuse to be farther from you."

"It'd be a great excuse. But telling me the truth would be better. In either case."

"Do you want me to come back?"

(Yes, yes, yes. Don't leave me.) "Yeah I do. In any way at all, I do. Hell, all the unforgiveable things have been said, now, right?"

"Oh, never say that." He was a shade too sure of this not to set off Kate's WTF sensor. She waited to let him speak again, but his next words were no help and she wondered if she'd been imagining something. "You have your car?"


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fresh air might help.

"...Hell, all the unforgiveable things have been said, now, right?"

"Oh, never say that." He was a shade too sure of this not to set off Kate's WTF sensor. She waited to let him speak again, but his next words were no help and she wondered if she'd been imagining something. "You have your car?"

"Yeah. It makes me less of a New Yorker but they like me to have it." Kate felt odd. For a minute she wondered if something had been wrong with the chicken, but she realized it was weirder than nausea.

"You're an Emergency Vehicle," Castle said absently. "Can you take me home and park illegally outside?"

"I always do." I think I'm light-hearted. I think I feel better. Maybe there's something to this 'clear conscience' idea. She watched him tidy the chicken and leftovers fries into the bag and roll down the top. The bottle of Vichy water he recapped and put in the tiny fridge with a twist of his mouth.

"What?" Kate asked.

"I'm compromising, not throwing it away." He quirked an absolutely dead smile toward her. "I'm still hurt, and I'm still angry and I don't altogether understand what you said tonight. It was… really a lot."

"I owe you a lot, explanations, apologies -" Please come back, Rick, I … Even Kate's inner chatter was beginning to quail at what she seemed to have done to him.

Rick continued. "And I think it's been an awful couple of days and I, personally, am flashing back way too much to September Eleventh, if that makes any sense. But I have to give you credit for chasing me down and I am pretty sure what you said wasn't any easier for you to say than it was for me to hear, and I don't think it was psychobabble. And you said some other things that I may pretend I didn't hear for the next nine or ten months, just because I … Damn it, Beckett. I can't even be properly spiteful at you."

They turned off the lights in his office and went back down the narrow stairs. "Hey Kent. Thanks for bringing the food up," he said to the bartender.

"No problem."

"Do I owe you anything for it?"

"I took it out of petty cash, wrote it up. Including the tip."

"Was I generous?"

"You always are."

"Are you a film student?"

"Minor."

"Major?"

"English and economics."

Rick nodded. "I'm lucky to have you. But let me know if you need a reference."

"I like it here for now. Good night, Detective Beckett."

Kate nodded at him and they went into the cool damp dark to the bar's miniscule parking area.

Rick slid into the passenger seat. It was familiar; the hours he had spent with Kate doing surveillance, mostly earlier in their partnership, came back. He felt better, and he resented and distrusted feeling better. "When were you going to tell me? That you remembered what I said, I mean."

Kate turned the engine back off — she hadn't pulled out of the parking place. "I hadn't really decided. You knew I was seeing my therapist again, the one who certified me ready to come back to duty? I'm still going once or twice a week. I told him I remembered the day I was shot pretty early on. It took me awhile to .. To tell him the details,. I saw you run toward me just at the same time I felt something hit me. I do remember seeing you, hearing you — saying — you —"

Rick was just fine with Kate being in pain over lying to him, but he found he wasn't happy with her having to revisit that day. He took the burden of saying the words just then. "That I loved you, yeah, go on—" He was pretty sure she gave him a quick grateful look. It was easier to talk sitting side by side, in the streetlight, than it had been staring at one another.

"And I remember hearing Esposito and Ryan shouting, flashes of the ambulance and Lanie yelling at me, but by then I must have lost a lot of blood and I don't remember getting to the hospital."

"They were ready at the emergency room door when we got there," Rick said. "We were lucky it wasn't far."

" I remember I wanted to talk to you before the burial but there just wasn't time. We had that awful fight and the next time I saw you—" she broke off. "I couldn't talk to you. We had to figure out what to say."

"You did a good job. No one's ever questioned it." Technically, he supposed, she had lied, in much the same way he was accusing her of having lied to him. To protect Mongtomery's family, and his memory, instead of herself. To keep the whole conspiracy/coverup/kidnapping history out of the news, though; hard to know if it was bad or good.

As Kate was wondering herself, now. "Should we have let it go? Let the whole thing go into the public, the press, let someone else ask the questions?"

"He died," Rick said, "trying to bring them down, and to protect you. That was his call, his take on the situation. And since then I haven't learned anything to say he was wrong., except that there was still someone else ready to take you out for looking too hard. And Kate, there still is —"

"They never found the shooter."

"They never found who was behind him, either. Whoever was setting up bank accounts in Dubai was not out there with a gun at the cemetery."

"Roy shouldn't have died for me."

"It wasn't just for you. He told me Lockwood said it was you or his family." Kate's head was down. " I'm sorry, Kate, Montgomery asked me to be there and get you away. He didn't tell me it was a no-win scenario but he was so damn direct on the phone. Get there, take you away from the action. He made me promise. And once I was there, I couldn't let you die, I couldn't let him die knowing you were lost—he was unlucky there were as many as there were, he didn't run out of bullets, Kate, he might have made it—"

"You should have let me stay—"

"They'd have have killed you first, to hurt him, to keep themselves safe. I don't really understand why Lockwood didn't shoot Montgomery the night before."

"Because he though he had Roy sewn up. Because he had kept the secret for so long—" at this Kate's voice broke entirely and she wept. Rick stood it for a minute or two.

"CRAP," he said softly to the world, undoing his seat belt. "Dammit, Beckett. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He was worth crying about." He moved across the front seat, and grabbed his partner's slender shoulders and held her while she shook, close against him.

"Nobody will talk about him," she said, between hard sobs. "I missed all that. I missed all that because I was too stupid, I should have come in, Evelyn's moved back to Chicago—" and she cried again, and then the sound changed. She thumped Castle on the chest. "And he knew all the time. He knew all the time, he knew when Coonan nearly killed you, he knew when Raglan was killed—" her next few breaths were keening sobs that Castle somehow recognized as fury. "How could he do that? How, could, he, do that?" and then she just cried again. "I miss him so much. I miss him so much, Castle."

"I miss him too, Kate, I miss him, and Ryan and Espo miss him, and they're hurting too."

"They loved him too." She just cried now, less violently, and Rick wondered if the Crown Vic possessed a box of Kleenex. His handkerchief was on the wrong side but he gave it to her anyway, aware of her soft hair, and her terribly thin body, and if he put his lips in her hair it might have been him leaving a kiss on Alexis. How hard the women he knew cried. The ones he loved did, anyway. Meredith mostly pouted and he had never seen Gina out of her own control. In any situation. "He was a really good captain," Kate said, as she began to be able to breathe again. Tears trickled down her face. She put it back against his cheek. His neck was wet, sticky, slightly cold. If anyone asks, the tears are all hers.

He pulled out his phone, speed-dial. "Kent. Water. Kleenex. In the parking lot."

"On my way." With the engine off, the windows didn't work so Rick opened his door, his other arm still holding Beckett. The bartender passed him three bottles of water— local— and an opened box of tissues. "You didn't need a whole box?"

"No, thanks. Thank you. It's not always like this."

"You'd be surprised. Would you like some tea?"

"I would kill for some, yes. One bag, extra milk. For both of us. Two sugars for her."

"No problem."

Well, it's nice someone isn't having any problem. The woman-he-loved-who-had-betrayed-him (Didn't she just tell you she wasn't an archetype, Rick?) was a soggy, sexy mess in his arms. She'd be sexy dipped in the Hudson. She was, I can remember it distinctly. Crying over another man. In Montgomery's case, that's okay. Rick considered. This was certainly one of the worst days of his life. Certainly one of the most important, as far as solving the crime was concerned. Certainly one of the hardest. It was, by this time, difficult to recall the morning. He had had a lowering headache for most of his life, it seemed. His lack of immediate desire to tear Kate's clothes off was strange (After this day you find that strange? Yeah, I do, all right?) but convenient. Usually if a woman cried that hard she needed to go to bed, alone. Usually if they cried that hard, he also needed to go to bed, alone, but certain things still needed to be said. Only not right this second.

Rick sat and hated, carefully, in proportion, Coonan (a lot), Raglan (some, but he'd tried to come clean), McCallister, Lockwood (a hundred, a thousand deaths were not enough for Lockwood), whoever had shot Kate (he had a special place for him in hell), whoever had framed the mayor, and whoever was behind them all. If that didn't include whoever had his 50K from the deal with Coonan, Castle hated him too.

He couldn't deal with hating Montgomery; he'd admired the man more the longer he knew him, he was grateful to him. He'd played poker with him, had good times. Rick was inclined to think the captain had paid his debt with his life, regardless of what Beckett pointed out, how much Roy had kept secret… but the 'good police captain' he had played so long, so well, was also true. Another person like Kate had said she was: not a tragic hero with a flaw, not an evil man, not even a good man with a monkey on his back, unless the monkey was his past. A person with contradictions history had made him keep, after some casual deed, some moment of failing.

Kent knocked on the window with a small tray. Castle opened the door again.

"The muffins are stale this time of night. One apricot-almond, one pecan-pie. Tea, regular Red Rose. Milk, 2%. Can you think of anything else I can get you? It's quiet in there."

"Can I adopt you?"

"I'll ask my mom."

The bartender left. Kate sat up and used some Kleenex. He drank half a bottle of water and passed it to her. "There's tea. And day-old muffins."

"Dibs on the apricot," she answered, congested.

"We can split them." He handed her the tray and broke the muffins fairly into mostly halves. "I blame everything on low blood sugar. Insufficiently empty carbs."

Kate coughed on a crumb. He gave her the tea marked carefully "2T S" on the lid, which she could damn well take off herself. Rick considered that his severity was pretty soggy too. "Sorry," Kate said, when she could talk.

"Maybe enough apology for tonight. I…I want to hold you again, damn, I'm sorry about Montgomery, Kate. Really sorry for your loss."

"And yours." She leaned a shoulder against him, somehow, not interfering with either of their cup-holding arms.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or not.

If anyone touched as they took a fragment of muffin, no one twitched away. "Is this what it takes to get us to sit and talk?" Kate asked.

"Christ, I hope not. I can't do this very many times." Implying that wherever I am it's not as far as I'll go to be with her. Not what I said this morning. Implying we'll be together to to do this again. I think she heard me say that. "When you say 'this' is what it takes us to sit and talk—" rant, cry, argue "—what 'this' do you mean…?" Rick inquired.

"Blowing up part of the city, blowing up…ourselves. One another. Being partners. Blow up anything we might have, to blow up my silence."

"Explosives do bring down walls." And the rubble and collateral damage afterwards…

"My therapist would like that."

"Is he any good?"

"I can't tell. He has an insane woman for his client. Well, no; he thinks I am trying too hard not to be insane. Have you ever been in therapy?"

"Since I was an adult, you mean? Not because I was being thrown out of yet another school? Yeah, a couple times. Once to see if there was anything I could do to be a better single father. Alexis was not in great shape when she was little." Rick redacted his daughter's journey toward her present state of perfection, which worried him, as a matter of fact but she… anyway. "I actually liked the one who asked me 'If you buried your heart, what kind of plant would it grow?' but that's more of an 'emotion recollected in tranquility' kind of question. What does yours say?"

"Mostly he says 'What happened then?' and after that, 'How did that feel? How was that for you?"

"And you—" Rick carefully removed his arm from around her and squeezed his face before he said anything too terribly funny and bitter. He put the arm back. "Too early. And I really want to know."

"Probably exactly what you were going to say: I tell him I don't know or I fidget. About anything important, anyway. 'Important' meaning… pretty much everything except criminals and vics."

"What about me?" Rick asked. His voice was gentle, uninflected.

Kate rolled her eyes. "Mostly he tells me, about you. Mostly he says I should talk to you about how I feel."

"How do you feel?"

"Way more than I want to. You know that."

Rick was glad every ounce, every microgram of energy had been sapped out of him, because he knew a big part of himself wanted action. That would be joules, or maybe microvolts. Putting his fist through the windshield (or his inner copy editor) sounded really good.

"Beckett, Kate, love, we have been talking about this exact thing all night. I don't know. And if it makes you so unhappy to care about me —"

"It makes me scared!"

"I don't care! I don't ever want to hear you say that to me again." Inhale, Rick, exhale. "Because I can be scary and I know I am when I'm angry, and I know that makes it hard for me to talk about anything. But I am fairly sure that, until tonight anyway, I wasn't what's scaring you. You don't have enough sense to be frightened of getting killed, we settled that the day before Roy was. It's not like— is it? Like I have ever wanted to make you less than you are, whoever that is, whoever you want to be, to make you a nice, tame 'Mrs. Richard Castle' when you… you're such a glorious Kate Beckett. Goddess archetype or not. Deep breath, okay? I'm sorry I yelled." He felt his system take a minute to throw off the fight-or-flight hormones, felt Kate soften out of cast iron next to him. They finished their tea. "You want more tea? He's still open in there."

"I don't think having to pee will make this conversation any better, do you?"

"Actually," Rick said, "I'll be right back. Would you mind if I take your keys, just to be sure you'll still be here?"

She gave him the keys, but she went back inside with him. After one worried look, Kent ignored them, and they returned to the car both noticeably more relaxed.

"Ever wish you still smoked?"

"Oh God yes. I quit while I was still a teenager but —"

"The need for a cigarette break sometimes—"

"Yeah. How did you know I ever smoked?"

"Honestly, Rick. You were in love with Philip Marlowe. And Bogie." She wasn't in Rick's arms any more; he was back on his own side of the car. "Goddess archetype? Really?"

"Really. You were way off, the warrior maiden doesn't cover it."

"I don't see Nikki Heat in a goddessy way."

"Well, she isn't you. I could never write you." He was silent. "How do I say this?"

"You're worried about Page 105?"

"That was fiction. I don't, um, I wouldn't even kiss, and tell. I mean… the way I see you, you're unbelievable. I couldn't do you justice." And I don't want to share.

Kate was quiet for moment. "Point I had, about you making more of me than I am? Point made."

"And of course, slutty sells more books." Rick shrugged. "But I'm still right, or we wouldn't be here. We'd be dead several times. And… you're still right, it's just… hard." I love loving the you beyond who you think you are, Kate. And even if you're right, and I go too far, you don't go far enough. He sighed. "So look, what are you scared of about us saying 'love'? Try to tell me. And not about what the new captain would say, don't try to get out of it."

"People die."

"Yep, you're right about that. The loss — would you rather not have known Royce? Montgomery? Your mom? You still speak to your dad, you must still tell him you love him. I know you love people."

"It's against my better judgement."

"Just grow up, Kate." Whose mouth was that? But it went on. "There are some advantages, they let you have a driver's license and sleep with people and drink alcohol, and sometimes you can have a job that actually means something. I know you like all those things" You didn't just say you know she likes sex? Well, I think she does. (It would make it a lot more fun.) Oh, you didn't just say that to her, "and you might as well buy the package. I'm sorry. My mouth slipped. A couple of days ago I'd have told you being in love, loving people, was pretty good. And regardless what else happens tonight I'll probably say that again. Sometime." At least, see me not playing for her pity. At least, not much. At least, trying not to. Much. Did I say I wanted the jar for my heart really solid? Really strong, opaque, not to be invaded by beauty or valor or lots of other words no one uses much. "So your reasons for being afraid are: we die, we leave, we let you down?"

"You get killed because of me."

"I haven't. And I don't think that would be your choice, so it'd either be my choice, or bad luck, and the odds of dying by accident are about ten times those of getting murdered. I could get killed choking on a pretzel. Get over it. Not feeling, not loving isn't keeping you safe, and it's killing me in a way you never intended." I said that, too? "And, you know, this has nothing to do with waiting until your mother's death is solved. If you had to go throughout the world looking for a six-fingered hitman—" 'My name is Katherine Beckett, you killed my mother, prepare to die— If Kate can put up with someone with a mind like squirrel fuelled almost entirely on clichés "—maybe that would make sense. But we know all the parts are here in New York—"

"We don't know that —"

"We know enough of the parts are here. Enough of the parts to kill you, to frame the mayor, to tell me to keep you out of it—" oh shit. I said that. Rick stopped.

Kate had turned fully toward him.

"What are you talking about?"


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Have all the unforgiveable things been said yet?

Beckett couldn't read Rick's face; it was dark. His voice was the careful monotone of someone explaining something simple to someone…who was also simple. "When you take me home tonight, I will show you the doc on my smartboard. It's pretty much the same as the murder board you have at home on your mom."

"So?" That he had a version of her mother's case queued up was no surprise. After this long, it didn't even seem like an invasion of privacy.

"By 'pretty much,' I mean it also has all I could figure out from the very, very little Roy told me the night he made me come take you out of there." He paused. "The day before Roy died, he mailed some files to someone — I don't know to whom, but they were evidence against whoever it is really behind all this, the name Montgomery wouldn't give you —"

"McCallister's 'Dragon' —"

"Way too much credit. Not a dragon: a murderous, string-pulling sniper-using chicken. He's just a Big Bad."

"Bad enough."

"And big enough. Roy had paper on him, maybe Lockwood didn't know — but you were safe until you started investigating your mother's death again. We hit a dead end when we lost Coonan."

'Lost' was one way to put it, Kate supposed. -blood on the station floor, blood on her hands, warm body, no pulse-

"They must have tapped Raglan's phone. He stirred things up getting in touch with you, and the Bad sent Lockwood after him. I'd like to know what hold he had on McCallister: he never talked, even though he was sent to prison. He thought he was safe, until The Big Bad got Lockwood out, and he went to McCallister's cell and killed him."

"We know all that, Castle."

"I'm getting to the point. Not long after you came back to the precinct, the man who has Roy's evidence called me and explained that you were safe only so long as you stayed away from your mother's case. Or, you know, not just your mother's, the rest of them too. The attempt on your life, the shooting, was made while no one had the evidence in hand. I guess this guy —called himself Mr. Smith— received the files and put the fix back in, so you were safe. He seemed to think no one would threaten you unless you provoked them. I have to assume Smith has some culpability himself or why not just publish Roy's evidence?"

Whatever lightheartedness Kate had gained earlier was gone. She was raw from crying. This news didn't just remind her of her losses; it brought the case alive, into the car with them. "You still haven't finished, have you?"

"No, it gets worse. The same guy called me while we were investigating Laura Cambridge, the woman in the mayor's charity. He's the one who told me to listen for evidence. He told me there were 'forces at play.' I couldn't get him to be any more specific, but framing Weldon wasn't just about spiking his chances of being governor. And I'm pretty sure the Big Bad was behind that lawyer coming to shut Jordan Norris's mouth."

"That story Laura Cambridge wanted to tell, the one she died for — it was about him. The Big Bad."

"Probably." They sat there for a few minutes in the dark.

"And this is on your version of my mother's murder board, and you haven't told me."

"What am I supposed to tell you? 'Hey Kate, I've been taking calls from a shadowy figure who wants to keep you off your mother's murder case, so they don't kill you, too?' "

"That would have done just fine."

"You haven't had a history of being particularly rational about this case."

"What do you think! They killed my mother and Jennifer Stewart, Diane Cavanaugh, and Scott Murray twelve years ago, and, and Roy, they shot me, they silenced Laura Cambridge and Jolene Grainger, and they ruined your buddy the mayor's career!" She knew all their names. She would have recognized them on the street if they passed.

"And before they shot you, or Roy, they blew Raglan away in front of us and offed McCallister in jail and your father came and begged me to get you off the case. Before they came for Roy! Before he died trying to keep you safe. Before you bled out in my arms." Rick's voice was shaking now. "No. There's no reason for you to be rational about this case. But you said maybe you could let it be for awhile. I can't not ask you to lay off. Ask your father."

"My father…is not my partner." Kate tried to pick her words, but it was hard, since she didn't know what she wanted. "I need… different things from you."

"Don't ask me to help you die."

The words sat in the air for a long time. I'm too tired too fight about this now, Kate thought."I've thought about that."

"I know."

"Not assisted suicide—"

"I know," Rick said again. "Probably not suicide as such at all, just one day failing to step all the way out of the path of a truck. Or, maybe, not quite drawing your gun soon enough. Or maybe giving up a little sooner if your car went underwater. Just drawing a little farther back from of your life."

I should be getting really angry and yelling at this point, Kate thought. She was too tired.

Rick went on. "Maybe avoiding undoing a little mess in time to keep it from getting bigger."

"You're offering me an out?" Incredulity drew the words out longer.

"It's not much of an out. 'Wilful neglect while the balance of her mind was disturbed'? I didn't think you'd admit it, though- that you might think about dying."

"I haven't to, anyone else. Kovalic asks me if I ever think about hurting myself and of course I don't do that."

"Of course you don't." His voice was heavy with sarcasm. And —grief? Kate put her hand on Rick's arm. He didn't jerk away, but he didn't lean in, either. "You also don't actually take a potato peeler and use it on my heart, or Lanie's or Espo or anyone else's. I didn't think there's enough of mine left to fry, but what a surprise." Her hand on him tightened and he batted it away. "Nobody's life is their own, Kate, and yours less than most. If this case is so damned important you should be taking better care of yourself, not worse."

"I'm tired of fighting it." Yet another unspeakable thing, said out loud

Castle's entire shape transformed into alertness. "Hospital, now—"

"No! I meant the case. Stand down!"

"Jesus," Rick said with unmistakeable fervor. "And I mean like praying, Kate, please." He shuddered. "I am not joking when I say you're not the only one whose stress levels are doing her harm. Not joking. Not being funny. Actually, your stress levels are doing me harm."

"You said that sometime earlier, that I was killing you in ways I didn't intend."

"There are so many things about love that are really scary and last so much longer than death. Like living."

I don't want to cry anymore tonight, Kate thought, her eyes filling up.

"The hardest thing to do in this world is to live in it," Rick said after a moment. "That's why your shrink wants you to feel, wants you to stop and smell the roses and feel the thorns. Because otherwise they're just the same as the roses. And then there's no reason to live. We ask you to go easier on yourself, to stop and take time. Would it help if you recognized it takes more of a warrior to do that than to just flail around battlefields with a sword? Being alive, loving someone is not a soft option. Ask me how I know sometime." He shook his head, then turned to her and held out his hand. "I love you, Kate. Stay with me. Don't leave me. Kate, I love you."


	8. Chapter 8

"Did you hear me this time? Yes or no."

"Yes," Kate said faintly. Her hands moved without her volition and grasped Rick's, on the seat between them.

"A couple of hours ago that was the last thing I would ever have bet I'd telling you. Being angry with you and being let down, it sucks. It's — yeah, I have made you into an archetype, and I'll do it again and I hope you can break it more gently. Because, ah, God, you make me feel like one too. A better Ricky, more heroic. Sometimes better. Sometimes probably more dumb."

"A bulletproof vest that says 'Writer.'"

"Truth in advertising. But I told you — sometimes the Warrior Goddess is as close as I can get, all you'll let me have. Like when when you get remote. I know you aren't completely in control when you go off into your cave, your —"

"Into 'Poor Damaged Kate', you mean?"

"Into 'Don't touch me, don't talk to me, don't ask me how I am. Don't call me for three months while I get back my invulnerability.' Into someone who doesn't have time for friendship. You also have bona fide PSTD—"

"But that's a not good excuse to—"

"But no one except you thinks that's the whole story. All right, try this: I know you can't be all here yet, not all the time. I know you have demons on the inside you'd rather ignore; you'd rather go after demons on the outside. I don't want to tell you who to be, or make you someone you're not. Most of all, I don't want to lose the real you, even if she's damaged, and scarred, and messed up, and chickens out sometimes. Even when you're angry with me, even when I'm angry with you — I want to be around when you want me. I want to be around when you need me, even when you tell me to get lost. Maybe you'd do better without me, but I need you to know" — Rick's words failed. Kate took his hand to hold against her cheek. (This much of you I can hold really close, and still think straight.)

Rick took a deep breath and went on. "I need you to know, that what I love most about you? is real, and I want a chance to know you better. A real chance." They were holding each other's eyes now. (He still looks like hell. Like sad.) "But I'm not sure either of us is in all that much better shape than we were the last time I told you that I loved you. That I love you." He carried her hand from her cheek to his lips, just a brush; then not clutching her hand, just holding it. 

(I'm tireder than I thought. But not dead. Some of my body noticed that. At least I can think straight, anyhow.) She squeezed back. It was the time to answer. "I'm sorry, so very sorry, I made you wait this long, to hear me answer you. When I said I loved you, too, earlier? I meant it, and your friendship — no, don't look stricken, shut up and listen — having you for my friend means everything to me."

He loved you more than Alexis or me, Martha's voice reminded her.

"I wasn't friends with Josh, or Tom. Or Will. I think that's what was missing from being their lover. Being friends with you is more serious than what I had with them, and it does frighten me, not about dying but, yes, about living, and doing— and being your friend in return. I don't want to disappoint you again."

"You will, you know," Rick said. "And I will. Disappoint you, I mean. I'll try not to have stupid expectations— but, Kate, it's not about disappointment. It's getting over it that's important. I've heard."

"You've 'heard'?"

"Well, I'm a Big Damn Hero. I wouldn't know, myself."

We might make it through this after all, Kate thought with a rush of fresh hope. He's being an idiot again. She punched him gently with her free hand and Rick smiled at her. Still battered, but more of his joy than she had feared she'd ever see again.

"So — friends again?" Rick asked.

"I thought that was your call."

"It was, but then I told you about Deep Throat. Mr. Smith. And you didn't react as badly as I expected."

"I yelled at you some. It's not as bad as the first time. And maybe if I'm not an archetype I can learn something." Castle—her Castle— stifled something. "What?"

"You had any head injuries I missed?" he asked.

"No. But if it's bigger than my city — maybe I want to make a Federal case out of it."

"Not Will. Please —"

"No. It's not his style."

"Subtlety of a brick in the head."

"I was thinking of Jordan Shaw. You remember, when my apartment blew up?"

"The profiler. She is really cool, maybe… you sure she's not a dispossessed Soviet sleeper agent?"

"In the FBI?" She wanted to make a remark about how much of a fanboy he had been toward Special Agent Shaw, but Sophia Turner's ghost was still around.

"They have their bad seeds—"

Kate interrupted before he could detail the career of Robert Hanssen or anyone else. "I think… she could be discreet. I think she'd believe us."

Rick was staring off into the darkness. "I don't want to get her killed. But .. if it all goes wrong… it would be nice to know somebody knew what we know. Just — only give her hard copy, Kate, please? There are bots out there keeping track of everything."

"You have electronic files—"

"I have a hacker I know try to break into them every few months, too. And he's all over, umm, other people's-"

"NYPD?"

"No, but if you want industrial secrets—"

"They'd be inadmissible in court."

"Hell yeah." Kate saw Rick's mind was off again, plotting. Not yelling at her about whose life it was to lose — no, that was her line — I can do this. "So— friends again?"

Rick's attention was focussed back on her in an instant. "Always. As long as you'll let me. And sometimes when you think I'm attacking you, well— tell me. But mostly it'll be because I have your back."

The car seemed too small for the depth of the sigh as they both took a deep breath. She almost wanted to giggle.

"That was just awful," Rick said.

"Yeah. But I lived through it. I need a stretch before I drive you home." They each opened the car doors and moved around. Castle reached toward a streetlight, taller than ever.

"Did I say that was awful?"

"You mentioned it." Kate came around to the front of the car. "Hey, a couple weeks ago? You pulled me out of a sinking car? How about a hug?" Her voice shook again. Rick was there faster than she'd ever seen him move.

"A hug?"

"Alexis asked me, but you never have." By that time they were holding one another. "This is about as much intensity as I can take right now… But I'm not going to break, you know." Kate rested her forehead on Rick's shoulder again. It was still a little damp." She could feel his arms surrounding her as though he were holding a bird, and tightened her own grip.

"You have," he said. "But I know you'll heal stronger."


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This used to be part of the next story, which got Jossed. If I leave them here, we have the happy ending with the unjustifiable fluff.

They stood like that that for minutes? hours? finally safe in each others' arms, in a new weird still moment, where that was so much more than enough that Rick could hardly move. Kate was nestled against his chest as though they had been made to fit together, and for a wonder, neither of them was crying. _The evening is looking up._

"I said that this morning, I wanted you, and tomorrow I probably will again and I'll need to you to tell me to slow down," Rick said. It was still weird, not wanting to tear off her clothes.

"What if I don't want you to?"

_I'll think you don't have the sense God gave a golfball._ "I'm so used to your needing time I wouldn't know what to answer," Rick said. _Oh, that was sensitive all right._ "Honestly? I like change, we needed change; if this is how we are now, compared with how we were this afternoon, it was worth all of it. It cost a lot. So, can we see for a little while — days, not years — how we are? Like, did you really say you would stop working your mother's case, until further notice and discussion? Which I am willing to have if we get more information… but for now, I can, for real, look your father in the eye? and also not feel cold sweat when I think of you?"

He held her in his arms and thought he could feel her thinking. "Yeah," she agreed. "But, cold sweat? Really?"

"Hot sweat as well, of course, but that's a good feeling. Kate, I've been so damn terrified for you. Your life — any cop, any New Yorker's, anybody's life is balanced on so many knife-edges already, yet I actually allow my daughter to leave our house every day. I know how things happen to people, that the last time they have together can be any time at all. But snipers? Paramilitary extractions of people who want to kill you from courtrooms? I have some idea how you could sanely have a duty to your mother, and to the others, because—" because you are the most beautiful of the angels of vengeance, ooh, I want to write that sometime, but she told me to cut out the archetypes— "Because that's part of your desire for justice. But the rest of us, who are alive, we want some of you too. Cold sweat. Yes."

Kate took her head off Rick's shoulder look enough to look at him. He looked back. "I wish I had a better way with words," she said.

"It's a living, but it hasn't always got me where I wanted to go."

"And then you say things like that and I'm not intimidated anymore."

"A jackass is a wonderful thing to have around, see? I just mean, ah, Kate—" he crushed her suddenly to him for a moment. "The— that you heard me say 'I love you,' that you seem to like it, is key, is everything to me, is important; but I haven't been part of your life as long as your mother, alive or dead. Or even for the length of time you've been working her case. This is big, Kate. I don't want to glib through it. This is about the whole way you live. If you end up pursuing it again, I want that to be a choice—" and one I am involved in helping you make "— and it's really important for you to own it. For the choice— not to because you're getting bullied by people who love you, or bullies inside you telling to act like a—" he swallowed some poorly-selected words. "That you're acting freely and not because you put yourself in some archetype. I'm not the only one here who wants to act like a good story."

"My mom will always be part of me." He nodded, understanding, as Kate began to feel her way. "The way she died, and the way I've mourned her will always be part of me. And I do want what we all say— like you say, we say it glibly: I do want 'closure,' a clean case with all the ends tied-up. But I have done all I can. For now. And Roy chose to die and leave me a chance to live, if I'm willing to admit not everything gets a tidy ending. Which I should know, I have cold cases and they bother me sometimes but I can put them away." She stood a little free of him, proud and tall. "And sometimes I have to do that. And it's not a cop-out."

"It very much is not." _And anytime you want some excuses, Kate, I got a thousand, but I'm shutting up right now._

"So yes, I really mean it: I can stop prying. I can take the board in my living room down."

Rick felt something roll off of him. "One hell of a metaphor, Beckett."

"What?"

"Yeah. Walls? Down?"

"Oh. Hmm. Might be…" She was shocked. "Do people really work like that?"

"Life imitating art? Yes. It is incredibly satisfying. And you can use my secure smartboard any time you want."

"Middle of the night?" There was a purr in Kate's voice of pure evil.

"You're very supportive when I start to babble with relief."

"It does relieve some of the pressure." She giggled. "Poor Dr. Kovalic will be so happy!"

_And maybe you will, too, Kate, I haven't heard you laugh in a while._ "How will you tell him?"

"I'm supposed to be keeping some kind of journal. Like what you said, about paying attention to what happens, how I feel about what happens."

"So you can mail him a file?"

"No, he wanted me to use a pen and paper."

"So, let me guess — a partly-used spiral notebook from either your training days or college, with the pages you used at that time torn out. The spiral is half-squashed and the cover is in the process of detaching." He glanced down at her face. "I'm right, aren't I?"

"You looked in my bag?"

"No. Making an educated guess about how you drag your feet. It's either black or green and has a telephone number written on the shiny part."

"Dark green, and it's a website."

"I forgot, times have changed. In a few minutes, you're going to take me home and I'm going to fix your pissy self-image and your complete lack of respect for anyone in therapy."

"Oooooooooooooh, harsh."

"Right now I want to hold you longer. Okay?"

"Okay. I think, Rick? Very much okay."

He wanted to kiss her, tangle his lips in Kate's hair, but the sense of peace after a terrible day was too great to mess with. And I am tired in places I didn't know I could feel tired. So he kept his hands in acceptably formal places until she stirred. 

"So, if you really did mean to tell me you love me, we can have this again?" she asked.

"Yes. So, if you really didn't mind hearing that I love you, I can hold you without anyone dying, or nearly dying?"

"Yes. Can we mention that I said something about loving you, in return?"

"You were under pressure. The heat of the moment. Maybe you thought I was dying." _I was dying._ "Another thing I would like to talk about after the dust has settled."

"I meant it."

"I know." Rick brought her hand to his lips. "I know. Give me a little time?"

"I guess," Kate said. "I owe you as much time as you gave me."

Rick hated to leave her even slightly at sea but he was empty. "Not that much time. Please. I want … I want to be able to accept your heart, not just say, 'Great, thanks, me too.' Let me have time so I can recognize, I guess; cherish, enfold, celebrate, really feel what that means to you. My head is too full of synonyms and my heart is still too relieved. All right?" _And if I had to tell you I don't think you're able to know your own heart right now…that would not go over well._ Rick watched her face and it seemed she was all right with that. He kissed her fingers again. "Now, will you take me home, so we can talk office supplies porn?"


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rick gives Kate something more precious than his bodily fluids.

Kate drove quickly, quietly, to Castle's building. She rarely felt the ten years' age difference between them — there was no question which of them was more mature, right? Now she thought she could see what he would look like when he was 70. _And it is still damn good._ But how long has he looked so…barren? So hopeless? I did this to him? The heat she was used to feeling between them was banked, somehow — at least the circuit that rose in her wasn't completing itself in his eyes the way it had—till when? But she had never been so aware of his tenderness, either. Kate took one hand off the steering wheel and touched his hand where it lay between them. He squeezed back and the smile she could see as she tried to pay attention to the road was brief but real.

There was a legal parking place on Broome Street, and she pulled into it with amazement. "I should just leave the car here and walk home."

"Not at this time of night," Rick growled. "Besides, you have a spot at home, right?"

"Rent on it went up again, too." Kate was very conscious of his closeness next to her. They waved to the doorman and took the elevator up. Rick unlocked his door and stood aside to let her go in first; there was a night-light on the little table, more romantic than useful. He took her coat and she leaned back against him for a moment, until Rick changed them to another feather-gentle embrace. Kate didn't feel any hints to turn it to a kiss, but his acceptance? his deep enfolding? cherishing? his need to have her in his arms? among his synonyms gave her no disappointment. Again, tenderness: for her, from her to him. That night had been just as awful as he'd said. "So good to hold you, Rick."

His words were muffled in her hair. "Kate. SO good."

Kate felt his exhaustion through his shoulders, through the pressure on her shoulders. "I'm so sorry I put you through… all this."

"Where would we start, if we apologized for every missed signal? I'd never thought just getting to this would be so hard on either of us." He hugged a little closer as he said 'to this.' "But don't —, I mean, I won't let go easily now, either."

"I won't let you go."

They did leave that particular touch, eventually. "Hungry? Thirsty?" Rick asked, keeping his voice low. Kate shook her head and they went into his study, closing the door. She went straight to his darkened smartboard. He sighed and turned it on, waking up his computer and finding the 'murder board' file he had made.

"It looks like you told me everything you have here," Kate said. She wondered, as she enjoyed the technology, playing a little bit, if she really could leave the case alone. _It feels like yes. It feels like YES. It's all right to leave it. Staying alive is not being defeated._

"Of course I did," Rick said, rummaging in a box. "How dumb do you — oh, just don't answer." He stopped and looked at her. "Beckett?"

When had her name sounded like something of so much value? But she found her voice breaking. "She's starting to look young, that's all. I was born when she was 25. This picture was taken a year or two before she died."

"So, 44… too young to have a daughter your age," Rick said. He slipped an arm around her waist. Kate snuggled. "And just the right age to have someone a little older than Alexis. Looks younger every day, from where I stand."

"You have a couple years to go—"

""It's not the years, it's the mileage.' …Are you okay?"

_'When people ask you that, Kate, it means they want to know how you are. How you feel,'_ her therapist's words came back. Nowhere safer than this, ever. "I think I am. I'm —I'm trying out what it's like to think of this" she waved at the smartboard "as a cold case." She looked at her mother, at Roy Montgomery— he'd look young to her, some day, at the faces of killers and victims. She heard Rick's sharp intake of breath. "What?"

"Crap. Stupid writer thoughts. Poem I read."

"Give?"

"Just once today, Beckett, I want not to cry. Can we save it for later? I promise." Kate looked at her writer. _If I'm his muse, he's MY writer._ The months or years she had spent not allowing Richard Castle, scandalous writer of racy prose, to touch her, despite his tastiness; now the hour of finding a quietness in him he seemed to be able to share. She nodded.

"Come and look at this." He had put three flat glass-topped boxes on his desk.

"What have you got?"

"Pick a pen. From this one, or this one."

"Are they cigar boxes?"

"They're collector's boxes for fountain pens. You know. The kind that use ink? That make your writing look better, not worse, that suggest what you write is unique and valuable, instead of mass-produced and disposable?"

"Not really," Kate said. The pens lay in slightly velvety slots, blotches of blue or black or a brown like dried blood in this one. All colors of shiny plastic and bright metal; she guessed they were a range of costs and qualities, too. The second box had only half its slots filled, was cleaner. The third was smaller, containing only three pens; slots for two more. Two of these looked like works of art, scrolls and swirls of gold or silver in Art Deco; one was a dull scratched black celluloid. "These are the collector's items?"

"The ones I probably shouldn't have bought, anyway. But they were so beautiful, and they do write very well. I use them sometimes but I'm not comfortable with platinum."

"And that one?" Kate pointed to the ugly duckling.

"That one has a credible provenance to Raymond Chandler."

"No Poe?"

"He only had dip pens." Rick picked up the middle box. "Here's the one I wrote my first two books with." He uncapped the scratched brown plastic. "Perfectly good cheap Parker and see the nib?"

"It looks worn?"

"First pen I ever wore out," he said with great satisfaction. "This box is mostly some pretty things, but I don't use them much.

"And the third?" Kate asked. "Ink stains?"

"The ones I use. I like to change colors sometimes. Come on, choose one."

"I'll lose it —"

"I promise these are just pens normal people would buy."

"Normal people buy fountain pens?"

"You'd be surprised." He watched her as Kate's hands hovered about the pens. There was a smooth aluminum one, a bit larger, looking like it was made for a trendy engineer. A rocket-designer. No swirls. "Oh, good, the Lamy. Yeah, try that one."

Rick indicated a pad of paper. Kate hesitated, uncapped it, and wrote 'Meet me under the clock at Grand Central Station.' Her handwriting, which she usually despised, looked more like, well — herself. "Hmm." She wrote 'Katherine Constantia Beckett.'

"Your middle name is Constantia?"

"My mother's grandmother. She came over from somewhere in Middle Europe and I doubt that she spelled it that way. My mother loved her. She died in 1963. My mom said I look like her." She smiled at Rick. "More layers."

"Try a couple of the other pens." She did. There were others she liked, including a little orange one from the next box up, but it looked too much like a jewel and she put it aside.

"If I have to take one, I would like the —Lamy? Why are you smiling?"

"That's the one I used to write Heat Wave. Nikki wants you to have it." The look on his face was closer to the happy, trouble-causing Castle than Kate had seen in awhile, and though she rolled her eyes, Kate also felt herself blushing. "Including page 105, yes." Rick's eyes definitely danced. "Come on, look at notebooks."

It was one of those printer-paper-boxes, only it seemed to be half-full of notebooks. Or books? Some of them had cloth or leather spines. "Castle, you have a Problem."

"I know. I feel at home in office-supply stores. I like to visit them when I'm on the road. And it's not that I don't travel with a notebook, it's things like getting stuck somewhere and separated from my luggage, or… anyway, it's cheaper than most of my other bad habits. An empty notebook is such pure potential. If I can find the perfect notebook I can write the Great American Novel."

Kate finally unpacked the box and laid the contents out. "Considering how severe you were to me, you have a lot of spiral-bound ones."

"I don't mind spiral-bound, I just knew yours would be beaten-up but too useable to throw away. There are times and places for thrift —"

"Strange to hear that from you—"

"But for a journal, something you're supposed to be using to help yourself out of a hard place — you need to show respect. It's not right to put your heart's blood in something you've stomped on and torn pages out of."

Kate felt this was getting a little too close to truth for comfort. "What do you use?"

"I thought you knew me. I am MUCH too pretentious to carry anything other than a Moleskine. But I think they're kind of narrow for spilling your guts, if you're not in practice." He showed her a shelf near his desk, crowded with battered Moleskines. Years and years of brown covers, a few other colors. "First drafts of first-drafts, appointments, shopping lists, phone numbers and addresses, business cards. I use my phone for a lot of that now, of course. But I like having the old ones to look at, so once in a while I print out all that and stick it in one of these. A good backup." He pulled one of the older ones off the shelf and opened it. "Alexis on her first day of kindergarten. Business card from the place we used to stop and get breakfast."

"Almost a scrapbook?"

"If you find me buying die-cut balloons to paste in—"

"Don't worry, I'll shoot you."

"Thanks. Don't forget that." He riffled through. "Floor plan of Derek Storm's apartment." In pencil, heavily annotated.

"Wow, and each piece of furniture?"

"I wanted to know what got broken when someone attacked him. I like being able to really look, sometimes. I mean, now there's all kinds of stuff on the Web — Jenny Crusie has a Pinterest board for her characters, and I can see how that would help, sometimes. Though I draw the line at collage."

Whatever had been going through Kate's head, the collision of two of her favorite writers knocked it aside. "You read Jennifer Crusie?"

"What's not to like about Jennifer Crusie? She knows more about the way stories work than I ever will. The heroine always gets a dog, a house, and a really decent guy, if not in that order. My mother and Alexis and I pass them back and forth." Rick looked are her, reading her expression. "And yes, the sex scenes are excellent. You look stunned."

"I think it's that you both know she's reading them. It's never been like that with my dad. Although… he does read Nikki Heat." They both winced.

"I'm still alive," Rick said. "At least he understands the difference between fiction and… anyway. So, Jenny Crusie — I'd rather my daughter learned about relationships from _Crazy for You_ than from _Twilight_."

Kate shook her head. "So many layers to the Castle onion."

"Damn right." He smiled. "You know how you're supposed to remember the good times?" Kate nodded. "One of the best, not long before Gina left: Alexis was about eleven. Gina found her reading my 'Dykes to Watch Out For' collection. I though Gina was going to sic Child Protective Services on me. Of course Alexis pointed out she'd read them before….It didn't really help when Alexis said they explained a lot of stuff no one seemed to want to tell her about. Oh, the yelling. Good times."

"Somehow that part of your life hasn't come out in your books." She tried, and failed, to imagine Derek Storm as a father. Nor Nikki a mother, either.

"It's not all fun and games, murders and betrayals, shootouts and decapitations — life has many facets too horrible to inflict on my readers. I write escapism, remember."

"But do you do the, the 'smelling the roses and writing down the thorns' thing you were colluding with my therapist about?"

"Sometimes," said Rick, becoming serious again. "One thing I learned before I finished my first book— whether I 'write what I know' or make something up, I'm writing out of myself. There I am, writing some entirely made-up impersonal plot, and it twists in my mind so I see it from a different angle and I realize 'Wow, is that how I feel about that? That was what was going on?' I try to work from an outline but every so often the scene just takes off somewhere amazing and I have to go there, even though it may not stay in the final product. So, no, I don't keep a journal the way your therapist wishes you would, not regularly. But yes, one way and another. I'm strongly in favor of anyone writing anything. I have people living in my head who want out, and they're all parts of me." He looked anxious. "Does that sound crazy?"

"And which of us is seeing a shrink? Who has the symptoms? Most of the time you're very high-functioning," she assured him. "And your readers? We need the eggs."

Rick apparently recognized the joke. "I can live with that."

Kate looked back at his desk. "So you have the notebooks you buy when you're homesick, and the ones that look like you're trying to find something that isn't a Moleskine, and what are the rest?"

Rick picked up a lovely hard-covered book with tooled leather covers. "Oh, art, I suppose. Or craft. Just nice things. This was a gift from someone at a con— a convention?"

"I know, been to some—"

"—Someone who made it. It really is too nice to use. I thought I would give it to Alexis when she gets married or something. I have a couple like this I write in sometimes, not routine things."

It was on the tip of Kate's tongue to ask _What? Poetry?_ But Castle wasn't showing any signs of wanting to share. Which was a different side than he usually showed. "You said the Moleskines were the wrong size for spilling my guts; what do you advise, then?"

"Well, something between A-4 and A-5, really, a little smaller than typing paper? You want lined or unlined?"

"Lined."

"Why did I even ask? How about one of those?" He pointed. Kate picked up a clean-looking eight by eight inch spiral-bound notebook, with slightly-textured black plastic covers and a red elastic band to mark a place or keep it closed.

"How about this one?"

"Excellent choice, Madame. College-ruled, from Staples, Minneapolis, 2009, I think. Do you need me to scribble on the first page because to break the curse?"

"I think I'll be all right." Kate was ready to be finished but Castle still looked thoughtful.

"That will do just fine, but I wish… take one of the nice ones, please Kate? Keep it at home. Write things sometimes when you don't feel you have to."

"Okay." Kate looked at the 'nice ones' and picked up one about the size of a trade paperback. The hard covers were flowered (fancy wrapping paper?), with an off-white linen spine. The pages were creamy, unlined, not too thin. "This have a story?"

"It was in the 'seconds' bin at a craft show a couple years ago. Artist mostly a photographer, but she tried making books. This one, she said she wasn't pleased with the way the endpapers went in. Can you see any problem?"

"Maybe off by about three degrees? But is that the front or the back?"

"You decide."

"I think I'll let you scribble on a page. You decide… And, Castle?" Rick stopped before he uncapped his pen (another Lamy, she thought, only red) and looked inquiry at her. Kate squirmed. "You have them right here... Could you print off the pictures of my mom, and Roy? Small enough so I can tape them in… I like the idea. Am I being weird?"

"Do you really want me to answer that?" Rick awakened the printer, clicked on the files.

"Yeah." She felt obscurely hurt.

Rick came and put his arms around her again. "I think even Martha Stewart would find it okay to have pictures of people you love and miss in your diary. Harmless. Sensitive in all the right ways. Psychologically sound to a degree you would find suspicious. And-- compared to having the murder board in your living room?"

She thought of it as more in the study, but he had a point. "When you put it that way."

"And more private, if that's a factor." He untwined them, gently. "Let me get you some ink, too."

 

When Kate got home her apartment seemed different. Or maybe she was what was different. Twenty hours earlier she had been angry at the bomber, puzzled a little by Castle but not aware of really thinking of him that much, and, to guess from the way she felt now, racked by guilt and warped by tension. The way she felt now might be exhaustion — for sure— or the release of something she had been carrying for weeks. Months. Years. She was still a little buzzed and knew it wasn't quite time to sleep. Might as well do that now.

Taking down the pictures, the notes. Putting them into one manila folder. Putting the folder into her desk drawer, far at the back. No vengeful Furies came and told her what a bad daughter she was. Kate took down the board, freeing up…a window. Something you look through, rather than at. Her mother's case really had been a wall. Kate shook her head at the solidity of the metaphor, wiped the now-revealed glass with window cleaner and thought about Castle. And, reluctantly, about herself.

She sat on the couch and opened the clean black notebook, put down the time and date from habit in clean flowing blue-black. It looked good, more assertive than ballpoint. _So tonight I took down my mother's murder board_ , she wrote. _It was a hell of a day. I'm lucky_ \-- false starts. She crossed them out. _I'm lucky that Castle_ long pause _I'm lucky that Castle really loves me. I'm lucky he was hurt, and angry, and let me know. I'm lucky he let me start to apologize. I don't want to screw up again._ Long pause.

She microwaved some milk. _I'm lucky Roy Montgomery loved me._ She drank the milk, washed her face, brushed her teeth. Put the pen (Castle said if it leaked he would buy her new everything, but he also said Lamy pens had supernatural powers of not leaking and of writing after months of disuse) and the notebook in her bag. The battered former journal, which had almost nothing written in it, she put in with the recycling.

She put the small bag of ink cartridges in her desk (upon inspection they were more of the blue-black; rose in color and SCENT, honestly Castle; and something brown called Tabac) and took the other little book to her bedroom. Changed into an old flannel shirt that came down to her knees, got under the blankets. The small orange pen that looked like a jewel had somehow attached itself to the spine of the second journal. _Fine, Castle, you win._ She would have to ask what its story was. None of her office supplies had much history, before these.

The first page read, in very neat print unlike his usual handwriting: 'This Book Belongs to Katherine Constantia Beckett, given with love and respect and hope by RAC,' and the date. She had expected something more like the way he signed his own books. _Oh. This is about me, not him. Places for the people in my head to get out._ A thought flickered past that she might want a picture of him stuck to that page, regardless of his tact.

The next pages held, carefully taped, prints of the two studio photos from the murder board, of her mother and her old captain. Maybe she would add some snapshots, when she next came across them. She knew there were some phone pics of Roy from poker nights, basketball games. She had some of her mother on her hard drive. Kate turned the page, and found some more of Rick's clearest handwriting.

> They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
> 
> Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
> 
> They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
> 
> They fell with their faces to the foe.
> 
> They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
> 
> Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
> 
> At the going down of the sun and in the morning
> 
> We will remember them.
> 
> -Laurence Binyon, "The Fallen," 1914

When she could, she blew her nose, and fetched her bag and took out the notebook for her therapist, and added one sentence. _I am lucky to be alive._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find the rest of the poem Rick gave to Kate at h t t p colon slash slash firstworldwar dot com slash poetsandprose slash binyon dot htm.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rick brings Lanie up to date on his side.

A couple of days after the bomb went off :

Lanie Parish did not work with her back to the door. It was bad enough being in the basement, without any real offices nearby. She also thought she had seen more than enough zombie flicks lately. But paying attention to footsteps in the darkened hallway was simple enough. She had oiled half the creak out of the hinges, so they made a sensible squeak rather than 'Ye Olde Haunted House' when Castle walked in. "You only look a little like the walking dead," she told him, coming out from behind her desk.

"I was in a hurry, so I haven't shaved. Is it that bad?"

"I think it's because I know the back story. Come here." To Rick's pleased surprise, she hugged him. "You've had a lousy couple of days. Sit down." He took the chair next to her desk. She closed the disturbing picture of someone's kidneys on her computer screen.

"Who talked?" he asked.

"Who hasn't? You scared hell out of Karpowski, she could hear you from outside the men's room while you were throwing up. She thought she'd have to get you an ambulance. She told me that after I had Kate in here, so it made some sense."

"Kate, before or after?" Lanie looked at him. He colored a little. "Before or after we, ah, cleared the air?"

"Both. First she came down and figured out what the hell was the matter with you, because of course you couldn't tell her- oh, never mind. Then, yesterday she came and said she had been being an idiot and had lied to your face for the better part of a year because she thought you couldn't possibly mean it when you said you loved her, since people always lie when you're bleeding and they think you're going to to die. I thought she'd seen better movies than that. I didn't kill her, because she was so happy I hardly recognized her. And then she tells me you had come clean about the Evil Not-Dead still being a threat, and apparently that gave her permission — after I don't know how many people had suggested that maybe this was too hot to handle— to back off on her mother's case."

"My God," Castle said. Despite the circles under his eyes and the stubble he managed to look radiant for a minute. "She's actually talking about it?"

"Well, probably not to everybody. But to me, and I think that's what she's off to say to her father today. And seeing him usually involves more prep time spent being uncomfortable."

"She loves him."

"Not all parents and kids are as lucky as you and Alexis. Nor has Alexis been doing a job you basically dislike for the last few years and damn near got herself killed. So, after Kate the second time, yesterday, Alexis came in. You should be proud."

"I am always proud of Alexis."

"Your daughter doesn't give up information unless she's sure she'll get some in return. She felt me out very carefully before mentioning that you and Beckett showed up at your place at one in the morning and talked for an hour before my girl left and, whatever it was your mother had been bent out of shape about, she seems to be over it."

"It's like living with very well-intentioned paparazzi," Castle said. "I'm not going to bother asking what you told her, because it will have been true, reasonably kind, and not much more than necessary; you're the sanest person in Homicide. Which is why I've sneaked in to see you today. So… any details you don't already have?"

"I don't know," Lanie told him. "I do know she looks ten years younger, or maybe older, if you've seen her looking as sad and lost as I have. Either way, much improved. She says she's put her mother's case on hiatus. The first time she said that, a long time ago, she looked like she'd lost a battle. This time she looked like she won. She's like a kid out of school."

"I hope to God, yes."

"What did you say? How did you persuade her to put it aside? "

"Javi told you about Mr. Smith?"

"You didn't tell him not to. And I am so glad to hear that's all out on the table, too."

"Lanie, I'm sorry. I never meant to make anyone keep any secrets from Kate, " Castle told her, as seriously as he had ever spoken. "Maybe I didn't need to have any secrets from her myself, but this last year… Telling her I was afraid she'd get killed again? (Did I say 'killed again?') Meeting secret agents in a parking garage?"

Lanie had never heard parentheses used in normal conversation, but it was Castle, after all. "Beyond even your taste for weird?"

"It was. As for Kate putting her her mother's case aside… I think she was just ready. Do most people need that long to figure out if something's not worth being shot for?"

"You know she's not most people. Maybe she also realized she had something she didn't want to lose. And about time."

"That's a lot to put on me." Lanie looked at Castle. It made him squirm. "Okay, maybe. But I think something finally clicked about what Roy was saying the night he was killed."

"She's never talked much about that."

"There's a detail you need, then." Castle had thought about that night many times, keeping silent; now the words poured out of him, at his tale-spinning best, far more than details. All Lanie had heard about that night was a choked, half-muttered version from Esposito, in circumstances not ideal for recalling much later. Castle told her everything, with the benefit of hindsight: the late afternoon call Montgomery made to him; the text he and Kate had both received from Ryan and Esposito; the captain's last words with the detective he had trained, betrayed and chosen to die for. How Castle had taken Kate from the field of battle; how they had both heard Montgomery talking to Lockwood, and the gunshots. About the local police responding to the shots, and soon after that, about the way Kate began the cover-up of Montgomery's place in the long story. But she didn't need to conceal anything from them about what had just happened.

"She told them she and Montgomery had planned to meet someone who might know more about the Lockwood case." How Montgomery feared Beckett and Castle would spook the witness and how he had sent them away, just before Lockwood himself and some other gunmen had arrived. How she and Castle had heard the shots and come back to the hangar too late. "She kept as close to the truth as she could, and unless someone was bothered enough to trace the text and calls to her phone, it wasn't a story that was going to come undone very easily."

Lanie was not quite in tears, but she felt the pain in Castle's voice. "Javi told me, after they texted her and she didn't call back right away, they got worried. But she hadn't told anyone where she was going."

"I called them," Rick said. "While Kate was still kneeling over Roy's body. They came barrelling into the crime scene, through all the Jersey cops, and helped me get her out of there as soon as our statements were taken. Ryan drove her home; she wasn't — she didn't— I was pretty sure she didn't blame me for Roy's death, but she asked Ryan to drive her car. We'd been on the outs for a day or so already."

"You what?"

Castle backtracked a day. "Her dad saw the news about Raglan getting shot in front of us. He came to ask me to get her to back off. Montgomery asked me the same thing, actually. I didn't think there was much hope, but I tried. When I asked her to back off the case she blew up at me… which might have been because I was pushing too hard…"

"As I recall that week she was pretty close to the edge anyway."

Castle shrugged. "Too much, too soon after, to think about that. When we got to her apartment, it was no time for us to mend anything. We just figured out what was safe to say about the captain's… involvement in the case. She was clear about not wanting me to stay and talk." He was silent again for minute. "I know I did the right thing, doing what he asked, getting Kate out of there— if he was right, that they would have gone for Beckett first. But what if we had just taken cover? Could we have saved him?"

It was nothing Lanie could answer. She handed him a can of seltzer from her mini-fridge. "I haven't been in many firefights," she told him. "Meaning, any; nor had to listen while someone fought and died. That's… I don't know. Maybe hearing that, I can understand why she needed so much time away. Not just her getting shot, herself. Damn you, Kate, the things you choose not to say." They pulled the tabs. "And she forgave him."

"Why I say 'extraordinary' about her." Castle was still moved, she could see. "I don't know if I could have said that. I don't know if I could have even thought it, and it wasn't my mother who was killed. "

"In my experience forgiveness is something like grief, or love; you have to keep doing it."

"I think she's doing grief now, maybe for the first time. And I think that's what pushed her over to being able to quit the case. Roy was very clear about why he was confronting Lockwood. Stupid word. He so damn nearly made it."

Lanie wondered when Castle had taken time to count what that night had cost him. If he had. "If Roy's death lets Kate put down this burden… at least it wasn't all wasted."

"And he took one very bad man down with him." There was ice in Castle's voice. After what Lockwood had done to Kevin and Javi, Lanie agreed.

"You're not going to take this investigation up now, are you?"

"More than I have? No. I promised I'd tell her anything I found out, and I don't want her picking it up again. Screw justice. I want Kate Beckett." The hardness in him softened again. "Which is why she's the angel and I'm just a writer. But she may let me try to look after her, now. Only…" Castle rubbed at his face. "I know where your loyalties lie, and that's why I'm talking to you, but if you see any advice you can give me, I hope you will."

"You want to gossip about Kate."

"I could quibble about your choice of words; actually I just want some…I think I want your permission. I want to know if she's in any shape … do you think? What I mean is, may I have your permission to court your best friend?"

"What you mean is," Lanie said, trying, too, to figure it out, "is whether she's in any state for you to court her."

"That's it, but also…."

"You're not sure about what?"

"About either of us. She's sort of in rebound mode for all the time she was, not to sound melodramatic —"

"You love that stuff—"

"Haunted by, maybe possessed? by her mother's case. And I, I am burned toast right now. I have emotional whiplash. For what, eight months? I wait for her to tell me it's okay that I love her. Now it's a subject I'm not hurrying to open. I yelled at her for telling me she was scared, and now I'm second-guessing everything. I felt like she had chopped my chest open the other day." He stopped and a ghost of the loss of his faith in Beckett crept over his face again. "And I was more angry and hurt than I can ever remember being before, ever."

"You built a big piece of your world on her, a lot longer than any eight months."

He looked surprised that anyone had noticed. Lanie resisted the urge for a dope-slap. "Kate noticed, too, Castle. If she hadn't liked it, you'd have been sent home long ago. What were you going to say?"

"Okay, so it has been a long time. And then the other day I thought she'd destroyed everything I thought was true about her. And she actually did give me some pretty accurate remarks about not being a character in a story or a Goddess Archetype —"

"Only the two of you would ever fight about that—"

"I think she was right; what?"

"Never mind—"

"It can't have been more than a few hours between hearing her tell that witness she remembered everything from the time she was shot, and the time we talked things out, but …it was long enough to leave me feeling really burned." He shook his head. "I don't feel like everything is over or everything I loved in her was a lie, like I did; but I'm not quite able to relax and think it's nothing but good times ahead."

"That might be because you have brains, probably more than I would have given you credit for — oh, hush. Last year you had a fight with her, the next day Montgomery gets killed, then she gets shot…gives all of us the Greta Garbo treatment for three months, comes back and everything is supposed to be fine. Except she won't discuss any of it, even when you and Javi talk her down from a PTSD episode. Then there's a bomb in the city and she takes some feelings of yours that have been trying to mind their own business-- however dumb that might have been— and she stomps on them. Then you have another, major, air-clearing fight. And you wonder why you feel like burned toast. I'm not putting either of you down if I say you're entitled to your own version of PTSD."

"My head knows I still love her, and I think I know in my guts, but part of maybe my heart — it's like if I reach for her I KNOW it's going to hurt."

"Castle. I wasn't kidding. You have collateral damage from her getting shot. You said you had whiplash. Don't feel bad about needing time, yourself."

"Thank you," Castle said. " And it's not just me I'm concerned about. The real Kate is more than anything I added onto her. It's just— right now when she's made this dramatic u-turn—For now… I don't want her to think I don't want to be with her… I don't think she doesn't want to be with me," Castle said. "I just want her in her right mind, is all. I want this to last."

"Is that what you're afraid of?"

"Being a three time loser would be bad enough, but losing Beckett would be…" Castle closed his eyes. "I had a taste of that. I don't want to live there."

"I have to say, I enjoyed how light-hearted she was yesterday."

"I feel like she wants to rush off into the sunset right away. Where the sunset equals 'not farther than maybe Buffalo,' I don't mean she wants to leave the police or anything —"

Lanie cut to the chase. "Are you going to ask her to marry you?"

Castle had the grace not to look too surprised. "Can I give you a couple answers there? Yes. Probably. I hope so. Eventually. After I figure out if she'd like that or if I'd never see her again."

"You are paying attention. If you think she's scared of the L-word, just even show her a ring and you'll need a radio collar. But you know, there's another part of her that wants to have little Castle babies." She watched Castle blush so so deep it must have been painful. "As a physician I'd rather that was sooner than later."

"Thank you for saying more than I really wanted to hear."

"You ask me, you get what you get. Someone has to be practical. You know how much I love Kate, Castle. She's not stupid, she definitely has hormones and eyes and common sense. But show her something her really wants and —"

"She'll give you a list of reasons why she can't have it? I noticed. That's what feels a little off. In one evening she quits her mother's case and is ready to admit I love her." Lanie gave him a look. "Okay, and even to say she loves me."

"You really are not in all that much better shape than she is, are you?"

"Maybe not. I really don't want to screw this up. You can tell, I'm even asking for advice." Rick Castle in pain. It was not something Lanie liked to see. "Maybe you could give both of us some heavy drugs."

"Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind. Okay— not to flatter either of us, but we are her best friends, right?"

"You are, yeah— I'm never sure if she knows I'm on her side."

"I'll come back to that, some time," Lanie assured him. "But she kept your—" she hesitated.

" 'Declaration?' "

"— That'll do nicely—to herself like it was a trauma. She wasn't making fun of you behind your back."

"I have to admit, I wondered. She did say she'd discussed it with her therapist."

"I know him," Lanie said. "He's a really nice guy. Not stupid, which, when I heard she was seeing him professionally, gave me hope. But if he's the only one she spoke to about it…"

"Like a trauma," Castle said slowly. "Like something that happened that was too big to handle."

"Like something that happened to her the same week her mother's case blew up again, and she had a fight with you, and Roy died, and on the same day that she was shot, and the same day she knew for sure Roy had not killed off all the remnants of that bunch of murderous -" she searched for a word again.

"I'm not sensitive about 'bastard—' "

"I was going to say something worse but I wanted to avoid alliteration." Her concern for _le mot juste_ lifted Castle's heart far enough to show on his face. She was glad to see him look cheerful even for a moment. "Maybe it was all one package, and both of you can finally begin to unwrap now."

"I hope so." The sigh he gave came from his shoes, from his bones.

"Is anybody looking after you, Castle?" Lanie asked. "You don't have a therapist?"

"I haven't needed one lately, although I'm beginning to wonder."

"You have friends?"

"Does anyone have enough friends? Friends to dump things like this on? I have Nikki and Rook to torture. My mother actually looks after me as much as she can. Somewhat of a change from forty years ago, but not unwelcome. I'm talking with you because you're out of Kate's chain of command; I wouldn't do that to Espo or Ryan. I could have talked to Roy; hell, I did talk to him, but he was more protective than you are."

"I'm protective of Kate!" _And, hon, you have no idea how much I've been sticking up for you._

"Yeah, but you don't seem to think I'll use her and cast her aside. He worried."

"Before last spring, if you'd hurt her, I wouldn't have had time to kill you, because she would have strangled you herself. Well, I hope. She never even keyed Sorenson's car."

"I suppose it's too late for me to do it?" Rick looked briefly hopeful.

"It is. By some years. And it's not your car to key." Lanie looked at him. "You're not having anxiety attacks, writer's block, nightmares?"

"Not… many. More right after she was shot, but it's better. The other stuff, no."

"Not drinking too much, not playing in traffic?"

"If we hadn't had the major air-clearing fight, I dunno. I was ready to stomp off into the sunset myself and find a blonde; thank GOD Beckett found me first. But no symptoms now, except I'm exhausted."

"Loving Kate, the way you have, has been a long, quiet stress. Your own kind of haunting. But it was familiar. It's going to be different."

"I told her we had needed to change, and that where we are now was worth all it had cost to get there."

"Well, that was sweet, but it doesn't make it less frightening. I think you'll feel better soon, and I hope— I so want to think Kate will be somewhere near where she's meant to be soon. If you can just be kind to each other for a little while, then soon I think she'll be sane enough to court, as you put it."

"That would be nice." Lanie watched Castle do the thousand-mile stare.

"So, what are you going to do?" she asked.

"Wait and see a few days. Hope we catch a case that doesn't push too many buttons and see how she is."

"And see how you are. Try to be kind to yourself, like you would if you were writing about someone in your position."

"I don't write that kind of book. All of them, Nikki, Rook, my God, Derek, are hard-boiled. No one gets traumatized, not by love, not by death. But I also got told she's not that kind of character. So I'll try to keep that in mind." Castle rose, and held out both his hands to Lanie. She squeezed back.

"Next to seeing her happy, you know, I'd like to see you happy, yourself."

"Don't crack the egg of my being hard-boiled," he told her. "But you'll be the third to know about either of us. Thank you so much."

"You're welcome, Castle. Go take a nap."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think we leave them here, now, in this AU, where people actually talk things through and actually change their behavior. So very AU.
> 
>  
> 
> 'If it makes you feel better, add this to the end of each story: "The passage of time cleared their heads. They found it in their hearts to forget, forgive and move on. Together. THE END." ' Elodia, httpcolon//www dotfanfictiondotnet/u/1115574/


End file.
